To place you in context it's for a civ like game where there will always be 10 factions on the board whatever the number of players. The world is split in 2 realm with 5 faction each. That leaves some uncontrolled factions that would require and AI. Since a board game is more limited than video games, the AI need to be relatively easy to resolve with little book keeping.
An idea I had that should not be too complicated to implement that use event card to resolve AI actions. Each AI faction will draw an event card each turn from the stack that will trigger various effects to the players in relations with these AI factions (Adjacent, have treaties, etc). Each Faction could have an event stack of it's own. The draw frequency could also increase with game time: 0 cards at the beginning, then 1 and 2 cards at the end.
A mechanic like this could allow the players to manipulate the card stack trought the game when performing diplomatic actions. That could allow them to look and force an event, peek at the events to come, Peek and place the card on the top or at the bottom of the deck, etc.
I First thought of using a relation chart to know who is friendly with whom, but that seems to require a lot of book keeping. Instead the relations between the factions will be fixed and successful treaties could make the relations slightly better to make other treaties agreement easier. It also prevent the situation where the game ask for a player not to like another player. Here, the only thing it does it making it harder to conclude treaties.
As for the faction growth, Either in the first part of the game, the AI grow according to a specific pattern until it reaches it's max size, or either it starts at it's full size. But once the AI as his kingdom on the board, there is not much other things it needs to do to make the game run. This is why event cards seems like a good solution to implement AI actions.
Do you think that could be an simple an elegant way to implement an AI for non-playing factions?
